The emerging mind

The 2003 Reith Lectures from the BBC profiled Professor VS Ramachandaran, a noted neuroscientist and the Director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition at the University of California (San Diego). The Prof. talks about how the "activity of the 100 billion little wisps of protoplasm - the neurons in your brain - give rise to all the richness of our conscious experience, including the "redness" of red, the painfulness of pain or the exquisite flavour of Marmite or Vindaloo."

These audio files are in .rm format (RealMedia), but if you are on the Mac, you can use WireTapPro to convert them into .mp3 format and download directly into your iPod.

A new approach to conference learning

This article describes an engaging approach to devise workshops and conferences where participants' specific pain-points and objectives are targeted:

"Instead of using third-person case studies as the context for a problem-solving exercise, we drew from our participants’ actual needs. A template was e-mailed to early registrants, asking them to identify key points of their business challenges--the challenges that would form the basis of the team’s case problem."

Paired Interview Technique

"A paired interview is a method of collecting information from several people at the same time who represent the target audience. The paired interview is not two interviews being conducted simultaneously. The emphasis of the paired interview is to create a dynamic in which the participants interact with each other. In so doing, they validate or clearly identify differences in working practices and terminology."

Standards for online content authors

The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling

Steve Denning is out with a new book that looks at the nuts and bolts of storytelling in organizations. The first chapter of the book -- Telling the Right Story -- is available as a free download (PDF).

Malofiej Awards 2005

Children learn best when teaching is out of sync

Here's an interesting study on using gesture for teaching math to third-and-fourth graders:

University of Chicago researchers Melissa Singer and Susan Goldin-Meadow have done extensive research on the role of gesture in teaching, finding that teachers spontaneously use gestures to teach, and that the use of gestures increases when children are having difficulty with a topic. Surprisingly, they also found that very often these gestures did not match the verbal lesson being given by the teachers.

The researchers have found that children learn better when the teacher's speech and gestures differ.

Cisco CEO on U.S. Education: ‘We’re Losing the Battle’

David Kirkpatrick reports on John Chamber's lament on the state of US education:

To remain a player in the global economy, Chambers urges that our nation reform its primary and secondary educational system from kindergarten all the way through college and beyond. And he says we have to focus on preparing students for careers in engineering and other technical disciplines.

Why Logic Often Takes A Backseat

This article from BusinessWeek highlights another neuroscience application: neuroeconomics:

"Neuroeconomics, while still regarded skeptically by mainstream economists, could be the next big thing in the field. It promises to put economics on a firmer footing by describing people as they really are, not as some oversimplified mathematical model would have them be. Eventually it could help economists design incentives that gently guide people toward making decisions that are in their long-term best interests in everything from labor negotiations to diets to 401(k) plans."

Neuroscience has been getting a lot of buzz lately. National Geographic, Nature, New Scientist, Business Week and others have had feature-length articles on neuroscience applications. On the learning front too, George Siemens has already pointed out that neuroscience may go on to shape and define the future of learning.

Here are two books that have helped me to learn about neuroscience: Steven Johnson's Mind Wide Open, and Tom Stafford and Matt Webb's Mind Hacks.

Decision Games

Here's Jay's account of a project that I'm associated with: decision games. This term was coined by Gary Klein, in his book, Power of Intuition. Decision games are high impact learning events that are aimed at getting learners to practice decision-making skills that are to be exercised in ambiguous, uncertain events such as project management, risk management, competition analysis, emergency management, disaster management, etc.

Together with KM experts, Straits Knowledge, I'm involved in developing decision games that combine Gary Klein's work with intuitive decision making and Dave Snowden's work with narrative analysis to elicit knowledge from expert practitioners (as opposed to subject matter experts). What results from these techniques is a far cry from what is possible by just analyzing subject matter. (Malcolm Gladwell's Blink gives a good account of the kind of knowledge that can be elicited through these techniques.)

I will post more on this method at a later date. By the way, if you are wondering where I feature in Jay's article, it's with Pebble Road, my company. Yes, I've finally started out on my own. The website is a little bare right now, but will post more when I get the time.

Controlled and suggested vocabularies: Are tags making us dumb?

This post, by David Weinberger, offers wonderful insights on the pros and cons of folksonomies. Although much is said about the bottom-up, emergent properties of folksonomies, I'm still quite skeptical about the current state of folksonomy implementations. Decentralizing to these extremes always has its limits. Weinberger in his post lists some of these limits. I would add the phenomenon of the 'long tail' and 'information cascades' to his list.

I can't help thinking about the possibility of having a bottom-up 'synonym ring' which connects all the varying terms used for the same item. For example, PC Forum = pcforum05 = pcf = pcf05 etc. This falls into the 'aggregator' role that James Surowiecki talks about in his book, The Wisdom of Crowds. Surowiecki gives the example of Google as an aggregator of bottom-up links between pages. Here Google just identified and brought to life an already existing emergent parameter that existed between pages - the page rank via page referrals. Similarly, can a tag aggregator leverage the tag rank using tag referrals? If yes, then we have an emergent 'preferred term' with its surrounding synonym ring, which can be used to increase the recall and precision of a search.

The Dawn of Intelligent Machines

"Jeff Hawkins, the inventor of the Palm and the Treo, is finally doing something interesting with his life. He is figuring out how to build machines that he believes will truly work like the human brain."

How to start a startup

This is a good article on the points to keep in mind when you are starting a new business. It is simple and to the point.

"You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed."

To Be, or Not To Be: Intranet Justification

Nice article that shows how to go about justifying the design or redesign of an intranet to business decision makers. Here's the whole point:

"It's our job, as intranet professionals, to help management see the true worth of an intranet beyond the dollar. They need to understand a properly built and managed intranet has long-term benefits that will affect the company and its culture as a whole. It's not just a matter of how much money it will save or make — and if management doesn't have the foresight to realize this, then perhaps they have missed the whole point."

The Empathy Economy

This article on "design thinking" argues that as we are moving from "from a knowledge economy that was dominated by technology into an experience economy controlled by consumers and the corporations who empathize with them", we need different skill sets to survive in this new conceptual age. These skill sets will be centered around both design and business skills enhancing "right-brain empathy, inventiveness, and understanding."

Learner-Centered Principles and New Roles for Faculty and Students

I agree with Stephen Downes that this is a good presentation, bringing together pieces that make for an engaging learning environment. We need this kind of thinking to tip and embrace all forms of learning.

Blogging Clicks With Colleges

Cool tool: SlideShowPro

If you are into making audio slideshows like the ones you see in NY Times, or putting photo galleries on the Web, check out SlideShowPro. It's Flash-based and really simple to use. It gives an aesthetic and professional feel to your presentation. I' m lovin' it!

Knowledge Representations

Representations are material, they allow ideas and experience to have an independent existence in an externalized form, they help to capture emergent thought. Like a lump of clay, a representation is tangible, it can be pointed to, passed around, played with. It takes thought experimentation one step further, eliciting new ideas.

Five Lenses: Towards a Toolkit for Interaction Design

In this essay I explore these issues. I begin with a definition, and illustrate my approach to partitioning the terrain of interaction design using five conceptual "lenses." In so doing, I cover most of what I see as the theoretical roots of interaction design. I then turn to the role of theory in interaction design, and suggest that a good way to begin is to assemble a toolkit of concepts for interaction design that consists of appropriately sized theoretical constructs.